This blog started as a photo journal of the construction progress of our" little cabin in the woods" Contractor: Mike Kennedy, Hazel Green, Al. Construction began 12/7/2009 move in date: March 14, 2010 For many years Bob had wanted a "little cabin in the woods"..the construction of his cabin was completed just one month before he died. I deeply regret that he never got to enjoy living here.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Feb 20, 2014
Jo Ann 2/02/1942 - 2/09/2014
My sister - Jo Ann - I am 7 years her senior - when Bob and I married she was only 11...We remained in Covington for just one year - the balance of our life together we lived elsewhere - not close to mother and my two youngest siblings...The two years we were in San Jose, Ca. and the 13 years we lived in Chicago our visits with the family were few and far between...
I believe JoAnn was only 15 years old when she married. She and Frank Smith had 7 children...6 boys and finally, the seventh was a girl!!!! Life was certainly not easy for them...they lost two of their children - one a teenager, the other a young adult
- about 10 years ago she suffered a major heart attach that damaged over half of her heart and had lived with a disability every since.
- Frank's mother was very ill for a long time and they took her into their home and cared for her.
- JoAnn endured through many hardships - she endured with optimism and hopefulness..and I'm proud of her.
She was always so tiny - most years did not weight 100 lbs..but she was one of the strongest persons that I've known.
..I'm grateful for the time last summer that she came to Alabama and spent a week with me !!! And I'm so thankful that I was able to go to Houston and spend a few days with her at the hospital before she died.
When I think of her I will recall her "perkiness" and her forthrightness - and I will smile.
She was always completely frank, without hesitation.
I will celebrate her life with a toast and be thankful and proud that she was my sister.
To her children -I pray that their sadness and great sense of loss will pass and that happy memories of their life together will be what remains.
Her family was her life - her joy - what kept her going..now rest in peace little sister..I love you...
Sep 9, 2013
"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult;
our human loneliness is cause enough.
But it is a hard quest worth making
to find a comrade through whose steady presence
one becomes steadily the person one desires to be."
Anna Louise Strong
Sometimes I feel as though I've lost myself....
Jul 30, 2013
How Doctors Die...
Not a popular subject but...very interesting...expresses my sentiments exactly.....no un-necessary end-of-life, futile, over-treatment..no radiation, no chemo,...no CPR...of course, circumstance are not the same for everyone...age is a factor...Like most everyone else
I wish to die at home with my family....I understand family wanting to do everything possible to care for and prolong the life of their loved one...I went through that very thing 3 years ago with Bob...I'm so sorry that he had to endure his last year being drug from doctor to doctor...enduring the treatments that caused so much damage and eventually took his life....he was 80 years old for God's sake !!! I should have know better!!! His Cardiologist should have advised us instead of encouraging treatment....he was in a much better position to know the outcome than we were.
How Doctors Die
By KEN MURRAY, MD
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
————————————————————————-
Health 2.0 EDU offers online classes with the world’s top experts in health care and information technology. Tuesday, July 30th at 3pm/6pm ET join Merck’s Aman Bandhari and Thomas Tsang as they explain How HITECH and the ACA Are Changing the Data Landscape. Sign up here.
————————————————————————-
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.
To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.
The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.
But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.
Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.
Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.
It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.
Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.
Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.
But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.
Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.
We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.
Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.
Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. This post was originally published at Zócalo Public Square, a non-profit ideas exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.
I wish to die at home with my family....I understand family wanting to do everything possible to care for and prolong the life of their loved one...I went through that very thing 3 years ago with Bob...I'm so sorry that he had to endure his last year being drug from doctor to doctor...enduring the treatments that caused so much damage and eventually took his life....he was 80 years old for God's sake !!! I should have know better!!! His Cardiologist should have advised us instead of encouraging treatment....he was in a much better position to know the outcome than we were.
How Doctors Die
By KEN MURRAY, MD
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
————————————————————————-
Health 2.0 EDU offers online classes with the world’s top experts in health care and information technology. Tuesday, July 30th at 3pm/6pm ET join Merck’s Aman Bandhari and Thomas Tsang as they explain How HITECH and the ACA Are Changing the Data Landscape. Sign up here.
————————————————————————-
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.
To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.
The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.
But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.
Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.
Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.
It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.
Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.
Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.
But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.
Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.
We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.
Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.
Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. This post was originally published at Zócalo Public Square, a non-profit ideas exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.
Apr 14, 2013
3 years
"from the moment I saw you, I wanted to meet you.
from the moment I met you, I wanted to know you.
from the moment I knew you, I loved you.
from the moment I loved you, I wanted to share my life with you....
And from that moment to this moment, and for all the moments to come, I will
love you with all my heart."
...if that sounds like a Hallmark card that's 'cause it is....
the last birthday card that I ever gave him 10-5-2008. He had one more birthday...10-5-2009...celebrated one day after a one month stay in a Dallas rehab hospital...
Gone from us 3 years now...Does it get any "easier"?..it does not.
Rest in peace, my beloved.
Jan 10, 2013
We don't remember the days-we remember the moments
"When someone you love dies you don't lose them all at once; you lose them in pieces over a long time—the way their mail stops coming, and their scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in their closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of them that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that they're gone,forever—
there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Oct 15, 2012
Who Will Be Holding Your Hand
Watching
your beloved struggle to hold on to life and finally take their last
breath is something that impacts you for the rest of your life.. and re-enforces this truth:
" at the end of your life, it really doesn't matter what car you drive, what you're wearing, or how much money you have in the bank - what will matter is who is holding your hand & the impact you made on their life & others'."
" at the end of your life, it really doesn't matter what car you drive, what you're wearing, or how much money you have in the bank - what will matter is who is holding your hand & the impact you made on their life & others'."
Jul 5, 2012
Gone From My Sight
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"
"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight...that is... all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout:" Here she comes!"
And that is dying.
Henry van Dyke
Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"
"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight...that is... all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout:" Here she comes!"
And that is dying.
Henry van Dyke
Oct 25, 2011
A Fresh Endeavour
So now I've taken leave of life,
I thought you'd like to know, I still
Possess a mind in love, oh wife;
A soulful eye to catch a show of
Silent beauty – ever yours;
An ear to pick the metaphors
Of tonal dance in words you say,
Grasp a thought in verse you pray
Inside your head, bemused of mind,
Softly mournful, intertwined with
Understanding tears.
I'll drift a whisper o'er to you
To tell that I am quietly calm;
Keeping time till your adieu
To flesh, upon the carol of a
Psalm of consummation.
Now!
A fresh endeavour – we're forever
One together, resting yonder,
Cross our open plane of blue.
Mark R Slaughter 2009
I thought you'd like to know, I still
Possess a mind in love, oh wife;
A soulful eye to catch a show of
Silent beauty – ever yours;
An ear to pick the metaphors
Of tonal dance in words you say,
Grasp a thought in verse you pray
Inside your head, bemused of mind,
Softly mournful, intertwined with
Understanding tears.
I'll drift a whisper o'er to you
To tell that I am quietly calm;
Keeping time till your adieu
To flesh, upon the carol of a
Psalm of consummation.
Now!
A fresh endeavour – we're forever
One together, resting yonder,
Cross our open plane of blue.
Mark R Slaughter 2009
Sep 19, 2011
Worth Reading Again
Part of an April post on http://surfergrandma.blogspot.com/
"....Our hearts are so full, and give themselves so completely to what they love ...eventually what we love goes away and we get clobbered.
Try to remember that your beloved is not God. He will die...or you will - one of you will be left alone. The silence on the other end of the relationship makes you wonder if there's anybody there. The banality of your ongoing unpartnered life can make you feel angry and bitter
Love each other well, even if it must be foolishly, - you will be sorry at the end of your life if your fear of losing love keeps you from ever knowing it, and you will know firsthand that it really is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Accept the kindness of those who see your sorrow, and forgive the blindness of those who cannot.
And then abide with God, after you have lost everything else. So different from the unseen good fairy you may once have thought he was, before your life taught you anything different. So eternally present, so unafraid of your wildest grief or most violent rage....Because your spiritual sense have been changed by your trauma, you now sense things differently. Be patient with yourself as you learn what that way is. And then drink deeply and often at the well."
"....Our hearts are so full, and give themselves so completely to what they love ...eventually what we love goes away and we get clobbered.
Try to remember that your beloved is not God. He will die...or you will - one of you will be left alone. The silence on the other end of the relationship makes you wonder if there's anybody there. The banality of your ongoing unpartnered life can make you feel angry and bitter
Love each other well, even if it must be foolishly, - you will be sorry at the end of your life if your fear of losing love keeps you from ever knowing it, and you will know firsthand that it really is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Accept the kindness of those who see your sorrow, and forgive the blindness of those who cannot.
And then abide with God, after you have lost everything else. So different from the unseen good fairy you may once have thought he was, before your life taught you anything different. So eternally present, so unafraid of your wildest grief or most violent rage....Because your spiritual sense have been changed by your trauma, you now sense things differently. Be patient with yourself as you learn what that way is. And then drink deeply and often at the well."
Aug 16, 2011
Like It Is
A Texas friend took the time to copy and mail something to me that she thought might be of some comfort....she has experienced a similar loss three years ago. Thank you Jeanene.
In the months after Bob's death I was given much reading material... ( a great deal from this very friend)..some of what arrived in my mailbox was read... most was not. People just want to reach out...to do something...anything to try and share their feelings...to share that they are sorry....I understand and appreciate those efforts but the time was just not right and also, so much of it is the same..... The article received this week expressed clearly some of what I have learned these last, sad, 16 months...not that I haven't heard some of it before..I guess the timing was right.
ie:
"A Special Language"
"Death is the last taboo. It's not something people want to talk about. It's not something they KNOW HOW to talk about..(myself included..prior to now.)
Our instincts are wrong when it comes to grief.. Without a vocabulary to talk about death, we also lack an understanding of the grief. (that is a profound truth).
Right around the third month, ( probably longer for your family members) society looks at it's collective watch and says "OK, time to move on." The casseroles have stopped coming. The support system is ready to move on. But you're stuck. You're wallowing.
Left behind, alone with their grief, are the husband who lost a wife, the mother who lost a son, the surviving spouse of a suicide, the parent of a child killed by a drunken driver, the wife whose husband was murdered, the child whose parent died.
Without a language and understanding of grief, the communities we usually rely upon often fail us when it comes to loss. (This article is about support groups and although I agree with much of what it says I will not reiterate all of it)
The relatives all have their own healing to go through...their own loss to accept...and they sympathise with you but they have no way of knowing what you are experiencing.
Grief is such an intensely personal and individually unique emotion that the support community for young widows doesn't work for older widows, the support group for suicide doesn't help those who lost a relative to homicide. The grief is different for the loss of a husband than the loss of a father.
"Jane Doe" sleeps in bed with the clothes of her husband...the ones worn home from the hospital, folded and tucked beneath his pillow. They were married 35 years ...he's been dead for three, but she still hasn't accepted his death."
I still spend every night on the couch in my living room...where I watched my husband die...where I spent the nights with his hospital bed rolled over beside me and lowered so that I could see him, hear him, touch him. I don't know if I'll ever be able to sleep somewhere else....and I don't care...it's where I want to be. Before he was unable to open his eyes at all he laid in that room looking out at those windows - the ones in the picture at the top of this blog...just staring into space...he could not talk, hear or move much those last 2-3 weeks...it seemed as though he was preparing himself for death..he was drifting away..he rarely looked into my face...after 57 years of a very close relationship...that was hard...to see him leave me even before he died.
"There is no hierarchy of grief, no loss that is greater than another kind of loss. But for people whose spouses died after 30, 40, 50 years of marriage, the pain is deep, intense and ENDURING. The loss of a husband or wife is a tangible, physical piece of themselves that is missing, gone forever.. When you have lived with a person for a long time your sense of who you are is very much tied up to that life you built together...when you lose that shared history it leaves you in a very isolated, lonely place."
Back to me: I feel this way..so acutely..."I'm everything I am because you loved me"..."he gave me faith 'cause he believed"....etc. ..'makes me appear to be a fairly weak person..dependent...But I Was Not that way..on the contrary, I have been strong...I have felt confidence in myself ...to a point...I pretty much said and did what I wanted with little or no objections..., as long as I didn't push TOO much...he would only give so far...but he did go out of his way to keep things pleasant ...he was the most forthright person I've ever known...he spoke what he felt.
I digress..
When you've lived and loved all your life together with one person you are "one" on so many levels..you don't even realize it..until you lose that biggest part of yourself to death.....as for me, we were so much "one" that all the dear things that remain (family-home)) are not enough to give me reason to value the time I have left...and I know this is so hurtful to my children...I have loved them dearly..and still do...BUT...the "me" that was - is no longer me. I have not found myself...and if this disappoints my children I am sorry..some believe I have just given up on life....I did not give up on life..my life as it had been since age 16 left me...1951..60 years knowing and loving him...It doesn't make me less than what I always have been...it just makes me different..I feel guilty about this but it's something I have no control over...at least, not now.
The article tells about a man who after losing his wife of 50 years, leaves, without telling his sons, to find her...he literally tried to find her. "He went to Detroit where they had honeymooned..(Detroit? Honeymoon???) He went to the Chicago hotel where they had stayed while he attended a plumbers convention and danced in the Blue Room. He went to The Albuquerque, N.M motel where they had stayed while visiting the meteorite center in Az. He went to Las Vegas to Circus Circus, the casino where they always stayed. It was there that he found her.
I thought I saw her in the restaurant. She was sitting at a table eating..I was going to go up to her and hug her and say, "hello, honey," when two children came up to her on either side and her husband came up to talk to her. That brought me to my senses. A month after his sons called the police and reported their 85 yr. old dad missing he returned home to the empty condominium with the his-and-her easy chairs facing an entertainment unit decked with two rows of framed family pictures. No amount of consolation from friends, family or neighbors could assuage his grief. He spoke to rabbis, priest and clergymen. Nothing helped...it was later that he discovered the community of grief...with other widows and widowers who shared his experience, felt his loss, spoke the language of a broken heart.,,,you could tell they understood your pain. He began to heal...the intense grief fades but the sadness- the sense of loss remains and can knock you down at anytime. "
There is no place I can go, nothing I can do, that does not bring thoughts of him..the first thoughts when I wake are of him...the last ones at night..the joy or pleasure that these remembrances should give fill my heart with such sorrow..because I know they are over...right now, at this point of my journey the blessings I received from our life together bring only heartache...because it has ended. ...even when I lie down on that couch at 12-1-2am for my 3 to 4 hours of sleep I am wearing my ipod..... in an attempt to control my thoughts away from him by listening to music...most nights my awake time ends up on the couch peering out those same windows- at the same sky he had watched..crying out to be allowed to just sense his presence ...just to know he is there...somewhere...
But he is not there.
I, too, am looking for Bob...I am unwilling to give him up...
I have surrounded myself with his pictures...his corner of the room where all his "special" things are kept...his bibles that he read and studied so diligently, his house slippers beside his recliner.. I often " busy" myself to the point of exhaustion just to keep myself distracted from thoughts of him.. because when everything shuts off my grief consumes me.
I know this is unhealthy...I am at a loss as to how to overcome it. I think part of the problem is "I don't want to overcome it." I want to keep him..I'm 76 years old and I see my life as in the past... I feel that I've already had it all...I know that I'm not "special" in any way...I know others get beyond this sort of thing...maybe in time...
I must add that there are times when I can enjoy and receive small pleasures...when little Cara gives me a kiss or softly says "meme"...when I see the little boys coming across the yard to my cabin..going into the
snack drawer or frig to get something to drink...knowing they are welcomed and loved by me...as Barbara goes to extremes to share and understand and do things that she knows I enjoy....my flowers....but these things treasured are such a small part of my day...there are many hours left to my own resources...and I'm not very strong at all these days...and I don't think I should feel guilty about that ...there are times when you just cannot be strong...and when it gets dark is the worst time...
so don't call me at night.. :)
Just telling it like it is...
I love and value my children...
In the months after Bob's death I was given much reading material... ( a great deal from this very friend)..some of what arrived in my mailbox was read... most was not. People just want to reach out...to do something...anything to try and share their feelings...to share that they are sorry....I understand and appreciate those efforts but the time was just not right and also, so much of it is the same..... The article received this week expressed clearly some of what I have learned these last, sad, 16 months...not that I haven't heard some of it before..I guess the timing was right.
ie:
"A Special Language"
"Death is the last taboo. It's not something people want to talk about. It's not something they KNOW HOW to talk about..(myself included..prior to now.)
Our instincts are wrong when it comes to grief.. Without a vocabulary to talk about death, we also lack an understanding of the grief. (that is a profound truth).
Right around the third month, ( probably longer for your family members) society looks at it's collective watch and says "OK, time to move on." The casseroles have stopped coming. The support system is ready to move on. But you're stuck. You're wallowing.
Left behind, alone with their grief, are the husband who lost a wife, the mother who lost a son, the surviving spouse of a suicide, the parent of a child killed by a drunken driver, the wife whose husband was murdered, the child whose parent died.
Without a language and understanding of grief, the communities we usually rely upon often fail us when it comes to loss. (This article is about support groups and although I agree with much of what it says I will not reiterate all of it)
The relatives all have their own healing to go through...their own loss to accept...and they sympathise with you but they have no way of knowing what you are experiencing.
Grief is such an intensely personal and individually unique emotion that the support community for young widows doesn't work for older widows, the support group for suicide doesn't help those who lost a relative to homicide. The grief is different for the loss of a husband than the loss of a father.
"Jane Doe" sleeps in bed with the clothes of her husband...the ones worn home from the hospital, folded and tucked beneath his pillow. They were married 35 years ...he's been dead for three, but she still hasn't accepted his death."
I still spend every night on the couch in my living room...where I watched my husband die...where I spent the nights with his hospital bed rolled over beside me and lowered so that I could see him, hear him, touch him. I don't know if I'll ever be able to sleep somewhere else....and I don't care...it's where I want to be. Before he was unable to open his eyes at all he laid in that room looking out at those windows - the ones in the picture at the top of this blog...just staring into space...he could not talk, hear or move much those last 2-3 weeks...it seemed as though he was preparing himself for death..he was drifting away..he rarely looked into my face...after 57 years of a very close relationship...that was hard...to see him leave me even before he died.
"There is no hierarchy of grief, no loss that is greater than another kind of loss. But for people whose spouses died after 30, 40, 50 years of marriage, the pain is deep, intense and ENDURING. The loss of a husband or wife is a tangible, physical piece of themselves that is missing, gone forever.. When you have lived with a person for a long time your sense of who you are is very much tied up to that life you built together...when you lose that shared history it leaves you in a very isolated, lonely place."
Back to me: I feel this way..so acutely..."I'm everything I am because you loved me"..."he gave me faith 'cause he believed"....etc. ..'makes me appear to be a fairly weak person..dependent...But I Was Not that way..on the contrary, I have been strong...I have felt confidence in myself ...to a point...I pretty much said and did what I wanted with little or no objections..., as long as I didn't push TOO much...he would only give so far...but he did go out of his way to keep things pleasant ...he was the most forthright person I've ever known...he spoke what he felt.
I digress..
When you've lived and loved all your life together with one person you are "one" on so many levels..you don't even realize it..until you lose that biggest part of yourself to death.....as for me, we were so much "one" that all the dear things that remain (family-home)) are not enough to give me reason to value the time I have left...and I know this is so hurtful to my children...I have loved them dearly..and still do...BUT...the "me" that was - is no longer me. I have not found myself...and if this disappoints my children I am sorry..some believe I have just given up on life....I did not give up on life..my life as it had been since age 16 left me...1951..60 years knowing and loving him...It doesn't make me less than what I always have been...it just makes me different..I feel guilty about this but it's something I have no control over...at least, not now.
The article tells about a man who after losing his wife of 50 years, leaves, without telling his sons, to find her...he literally tried to find her. "He went to Detroit where they had honeymooned..(Detroit? Honeymoon???) He went to the Chicago hotel where they had stayed while he attended a plumbers convention and danced in the Blue Room. He went to The Albuquerque, N.M motel where they had stayed while visiting the meteorite center in Az. He went to Las Vegas to Circus Circus, the casino where they always stayed. It was there that he found her.
I thought I saw her in the restaurant. She was sitting at a table eating..I was going to go up to her and hug her and say, "hello, honey," when two children came up to her on either side and her husband came up to talk to her. That brought me to my senses. A month after his sons called the police and reported their 85 yr. old dad missing he returned home to the empty condominium with the his-and-her easy chairs facing an entertainment unit decked with two rows of framed family pictures. No amount of consolation from friends, family or neighbors could assuage his grief. He spoke to rabbis, priest and clergymen. Nothing helped...it was later that he discovered the community of grief...with other widows and widowers who shared his experience, felt his loss, spoke the language of a broken heart.,,,you could tell they understood your pain. He began to heal...the intense grief fades but the sadness- the sense of loss remains and can knock you down at anytime. "
There is no place I can go, nothing I can do, that does not bring thoughts of him..the first thoughts when I wake are of him...the last ones at night..the joy or pleasure that these remembrances should give fill my heart with such sorrow..because I know they are over...right now, at this point of my journey the blessings I received from our life together bring only heartache...because it has ended. ...even when I lie down on that couch at 12-1-2am for my 3 to 4 hours of sleep I am wearing my ipod..... in an attempt to control my thoughts away from him by listening to music...most nights my awake time ends up on the couch peering out those same windows- at the same sky he had watched..crying out to be allowed to just sense his presence ...just to know he is there...somewhere...
But he is not there.
I, too, am looking for Bob...I am unwilling to give him up...
I have surrounded myself with his pictures...his corner of the room where all his "special" things are kept...his bibles that he read and studied so diligently, his house slippers beside his recliner.. I often " busy" myself to the point of exhaustion just to keep myself distracted from thoughts of him.. because when everything shuts off my grief consumes me.
I know this is unhealthy...I am at a loss as to how to overcome it. I think part of the problem is "I don't want to overcome it." I want to keep him..I'm 76 years old and I see my life as in the past... I feel that I've already had it all...I know that I'm not "special" in any way...I know others get beyond this sort of thing...maybe in time...
I must add that there are times when I can enjoy and receive small pleasures...when little Cara gives me a kiss or softly says "meme"...when I see the little boys coming across the yard to my cabin..going into the
snack drawer or frig to get something to drink...knowing they are welcomed and loved by me...as Barbara goes to extremes to share and understand and do things that she knows I enjoy....my flowers....but these things treasured are such a small part of my day...there are many hours left to my own resources...and I'm not very strong at all these days...and I don't think I should feel guilty about that ...there are times when you just cannot be strong...and when it gets dark is the worst time...
so don't call me at night.. :)
Just telling it like it is...
I love and value my children...
Jul 14, 2011
2 am
Insomnia:
Chronic inability to fall asleep or remain asleep for an adequate length of time.
Sleep Deprivation:
A form of psychological torture inflicted by depriving the victim of sleep.
Depression:
The condition of feeling sad or despondent.
Clinical Depression:
A psychiatric disorder characterized by an inability to concentrate, insomnia, loss of appetite, anhedonia (an inability to experience pleasure), feelings of extreme sadness, guilt, helplessness and hopelessness, and thoughts of death.
Grief:
Deep mental anguish, as that arising from bereavement.
Stages of Grief:
Denial-
Anger-
Bargaining-
Depression-stuck here
Acceptance-
I measure every Grief I meet
by Emily Dickinson
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –
I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –
I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –
I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –
Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –
The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –
There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –
A sort they call "Despair" -
There's Banishment from native Eyes –
In sight of Native Air –
And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –
To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –
Anger-
Bargaining-
Depression-stuck here
Acceptance-
I measure every Grief I meet
by Emily Dickinson
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –
I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –
I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –
I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –
Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –
The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –
There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –
A sort they call "Despair" -
There's Banishment from native Eyes –
In sight of Native Air –
And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –
To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –
May 27, 2011
Apr 13, 2010
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